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8 SCRIPT REWRITE

Boris Borisovich Popov called his office to say that he was feeling under the weather. The doctor had told him he would have to take it easy for a few days, he explained. Some colleagues were surprised. Boris Borisovich’s slight build and adolescent features occasionally resembled those of a sickly child, but he was probably the most indus- trious and most disciplined man among them. ‘Working with him was a pleasure,’ one of them remarked later, ‘you couldn’t find anyone better in the whole service.’

Despite crying off work, Popov did not take to his bed, but – fit as a fiddle – walked out of his apartment, hailed a cab and made his way to Kiev’s Borispol airport, where he checked in for a flight to Odessa. Originally from Donetsk in eastern Ukraine and with Russian as his mother-tongue, his presence down south would not arouse suspicion provided he kept his wits about him.

On arrival in Odessa, he took a bus into town. It was a hot July day. The temperature was in the low eighties, but was made pleasant by a cheerful breeze coming off the Black Sea. Before long, Popov had found the private apartment he had rented. Within hours his three teammates had turned up – Natasha Obrizan and Messrs Grishko and Baranets. ‘We couldn’t stay in a hotel,’ explained Boris, ‘because we didn’t trust the local police.’ Only one other person in the whole country knew they were in Odessa: the Minister of the Interior.

Six months earlier Ukraine had undergone a dramatic convulsion – the Orange Revolution. This exceptionally fertile country, with the potential to provide the continent of Europe with more or less all the food it needs, was no stranger to drama. Twentieth-century regimes

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